Dysfunction Junction

Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images

Everywhere you turn with the GOP these days, you see dysfunction.

Take the pending vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. A cabinet secretary has not been impeached since the post-Civil War era, and that was for blatant corruption. And a handful of GOP members have enough backbone to push back against the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Q-GA) and to recommend against a snap impeachment vote. 

But no matter. House leadership appears to be plowing ahead, even though they might not have the votes to impeach Mayorkas. So, why even try? Because they need something to go back to their voters with, even if it’s just one lame Republican accomplishment after a full year in office. The impeachment effort against Joe Biden looks to be fading away, thanks to the incompetence of Rep. James Comer (R-KY), so the Mayorkas impeachment led by Greene is their next best option.

And take the border bill. The text of the bipartisan Senate bill had not even been released when House leadership came out against it. They apparently were following orders from former president Trump, who warned them not to hand Biden a policy win during the campaign. Trump needs the border “crisis” to remain unsolved so that he still can deploy his strongest talking point to attack President Biden.

When the border bill’s text did come out this weekend, proving clearly that it was not what the GOP in the House had claimed it was, House GOP leaders were unmoved. It was really no surprise. Their stonewalling demonstrated that they really had already made up their minds long ago. And they are now declaring that the bill won’t even receive a vote in the House.

Let’s take a closer look at these two further examples of GOP House dysfunction, and I’ll talk briefly at the end about two ways it might be overcome.

Impeachment dysfunction

Last Thursday, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who is not seeking reelection to his House seat, stated that he’s a “solid” no on impeaching Secretary Mayorkas. And Buck has made clear that he is “not changing his mind” on the matter. 

“This is not a high crime or misdemeanor. It's not an impeachable offense. This is a policy difference…. It's wrong and we should not set this precedent,” Buck told MSNBC.

In other words, were the Mayorkas impeachment vote taken today, it would already not fall along perfect party lines.

As the Washington Post noted, there are other possible holdouts. Chief among them is Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), who wrote an op-ed critical of Rep. Greene’s attempt to recast the power of impeachment. While McClintock blasted Mayorkas for “maladministration, malfeasance and neglect of duties on a truly historic scale” (and sounded very much like a partisan in the process), he concluded that “these are not impeachable offenses.” He even called it an “unconstitutional abuse of power.”

And remember the speaker pro tempore, Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (R-NC), who stepped in after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was removed? Like Buck, McHenry is retiring, so he may have less to lose in defying his own party. And per the Post, McHenry has warned that “impeachment is a hugely significant vote and not one that should be taken lightly.… We should make a strong case that can succeed on its merits, not simply try to score political points.”

Yet political points are exactly what Greene and Johnson are seeking to score with this nonsense. Still, it might not be so easy. If there are already three possible no votes among the GOP conference, that spells trouble for the push to impeach Mayorkas. The hard math dictates this: If these three voted no, that would leave it at 214-215 to impeach, with all the absences and vacancies currently in the House, and two important undecideds. 

Those two other Republicans are Reps. David Joyce (R-OH) and Dan Newhouse (R-WA), the latter being the only Republican still in the House who voted to impeach Trump after January 6. Neither has said how he’ll vote, and both have at least signaled reservations about moving ahead with Mayorkas by voting against sending the Mayorkas impeachment question to committee in the first place. It would only take one of them to add his voice to the three most probable dissenters to sink the impeachment.

Speaker Johnson hasn’t learned the Pelosi rule that you never take something to the floor that you might lose. And this Mayorkas impeachment effort very well might fail; right now it’s something of a crap shoot. If Republicans in the House weren’t collectively so broken, they’d be able to count—and count on—votes the way Speaker Pelosi did. Instead, they are careening toward an impeachment vote that, if it even manages to pass, will be a blight upon an unbroken record of only impeaching cabinet officials for true high crimes and misdemeanors. 

Allied aid and border bill dysfunction

Rewind several months, and you may recall that it was the Republicans who insisted that any aid to Ukraine and Israel be paired with a change to border policy. They refused to provide funds to our allies so long as our own nation was being “invaded” (their words) and our own national security was compromised by the possibility of terrorist infiltration and fentanyl crossing the border (again, their fears, however unfounded).

Fine, said Democrats and the White House. We’re willing to strike a compromise and undertake a major shift on an increasingly unpopular set of migration, border and asylum policies, even at the cost of angering and alienating key progressive constituencies. The aid to Ukraine is being held hostage in bad faith and at great cost of lives. And the case backlogs and number of migrants currently waiting for their asylum claims to be adjudicated has mushroomed due to the GOP’s intentional withholding of federal funds to support our immigration system. The GOP has of course driven these crises through intentional neglect, but at least the Senate GOP has now offered to be partners in solving them.

So fine, we’ll strike a deal.

That was four months ago. Enter Trump. When he came out against the bill, which he had not read, his acolytes in the House followed suit. They claimed, falsely, that the bill would still permit 150,000 migrants to cross the border without authorization every month. They kept up this drumbeat, even when their GOP counterparts in the Senate said that was nonsense, please wait for the bill, it doesn’t do that at all.

But the die was cast. When the bill emerged this weekend, Trump came out swinging, claiming the bill was a “betrayal.” The bill’s Senate GOP negotiators, including its co-author Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), pushed back, but to little avail.

“It’s certainly not a betrayal,” Lankford told reporters. 

“How does he know it’s a betrayal if he hasn’t read it?” added Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA). “I mean, don’t be ignorant. Read the bill.”

But House GOP leaders weren’t interested in reading the bill. Second-in-command Steve Scalise (R-LA) said the bill would not even come up for a vote in the House. This is because if it did, the bill would likely pass, with enough GOP defectors joining Democrats to approve it.

The majority’s margin is thin enough, and the House rules are set up in such a way, to permit a small handful of extremists to block legislation from proceeding. They have in fact done so a record number of times in this unruly GOP-led House. But there isn’t a similar mechanism for forcing through legislation that House leadership doesn’t like. That’s a power to obstruct that Speaker Johnson and his allies continue to hold.

Instead, as I highlighted in my Sunday piece, Johnson is seeking to make an end-run around the bill by offering aid to Israel as a clean, stand-alone bill. But that would leave Ukraine out in the cold and facing Russia without any renewed U.S. aid. This would be a betrayal of historic proportion and could lead to devastating consequences for peace and security throughout Europe. 

But with the Putin caucus in effective control of the legislative agenda in the House, and right wing mouthpiece Tucker Carlson in Moscow today possibly to interview Putin in person, that is almost certainly their goal.

Dysfunction compunction 

The House GOP’s seemingly incurable dysfunction does have two possible solutions from where I sit.

The first, sadly, is budget brinksmanship. If the House won’t approve aid to our allies over its bad faith refusal to accept a border solution, all to aid Trump in his reelection, then the government will be faced with yet another shutdown over the budget, looming in just a few weeks. These issues around the border and aid to our allies and Gaza can be added to the growing pile of chips at stake in the budget. Already it seems clear that Johnson cannot control his conference and that the House Democrats need to step in to provide the votes he needs to pass any budget. Would Johnson be willing to shut down the entire government because he doesn’t even want to allow a vote on the aid and border package? We may learn the answer to that if the bill stalls out now as expected.

The second, of course, is massive and resounding electoral defeat of the GOP in November. That can only come from an angry, motivated and determined electorate that is tired of dysfunction, the betrayal of our allies, the undermining of democratic principles, the loss of cherished rights, and the GOP’s politicization of our national security, just to name a few.

As I’ve noted before, the GOP does understand the language of power. In a democracy such as ours, voters thankfully still hold that power, and they can wield it to great effect. We are all being called upon in November to do so in order to keep a fascist out of the White House and his cronies out of power in Congress, so that we may keep our Republic.